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Comment by rattray | Hacker News Reader

> I don't understand why you guys stay with AWS.

Who do you recommend instead (assuming in-house or Hetzner-equiv is out of reach)? Google Cloud? Azure? Rackspace?

Google Cloud if you're looking for something similar. It's just so much better and cheaper. I think a lot of the resistance here towards that kind of move is just because people are inherently lazy and they aren't paying the bill themselves.

(I'm guessing a relatively large part is also selfish attachment to the market leader because of employment reasons. I hate wasting money, both for myself and for my employer, so I don't really understand this kind of thinking - but I do understand how it could flourish in a venture capital-rich time/locale.)

I also recommend reading:

https://thehftguy.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-in-2016-why-you-...

Google also doesn't have the best record for developer tools.

Google Cloud doesn't exactly have the greatest reliability/uptime either.

https://status.cloud.google.com/summary tells a different story or do you have other information?

I have used GCP for some time without being affected from any incident.

That is a pretty awesome page.. way better than a page full of green icons, during an obvious outage... I like that they have writeups a few days after the incidents....

I'm not sure what you mean. If anything that link underscores my point. GCE has absolutely had it's own catastrophic errors. Remember last April when ALL instances in ALL regions went down?

https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16007?post-...

The GCP services are usually within their SLA target so I don't see the problem with the incidents. So you know what you buy and can take actions if you need a higher SLA for your application.

> so I don't see the problem with the incidents

All instances going down in all regions is an order of magnitude worse than a single service going down in a single region. You're deluding yourself if you think GCE is any more reliable than any other reputable cloud hosting platform.

While I agree that was a horrific outage for us, there's a big difference between no external connectivity for a few minutes (note: internal IPs still worked fine, as did access to APIs through that mechanism) and "ALL instances in ALL regions went down".

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and wouldn't want to be an incident responder at AWS today...)

At least Google has a post-mortem, at AWS everything would still show up green with some random note about 'increased error rates'.

GC's CDN doesn't cache files bigger than 4Mb. No Windows VMs. Bound to AWS for these 2 reasons.

GCE supports Windows VMs.

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/windows/

Someone else already mentioned Windows VMs.

Looks like CDN has a 10MB limit:

https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/caching

(work at Google Cloud)

As already mentioned, they do have Windows VM's but there are some caveats that indicate it's not fully baked yet. 1.) They require that each VM MUST have a public IP address so that Windows can talk to an activation server every 30 days. 2.) You cannot yet bring your own license.

What about something like B2 from https://www.backblaze.com/ ?

S3 in a single region is based out of multiple data centres / availability zone, with data distributed so that the loss of a single availability zone won't impact either data availability or durability, even to the point of being comfortable with complete physical destruction of an AZ. The same applies for Azure, GCP etc.

B2 is based out of a single DC (or at least, was at launch and I don't see anything that suggests that has changed?) You've got to decide what's most important to you. Data persistence or $$$.

OVH

Bad idea there, support is horrible.

What is your last datapoint on that?

The last year or two has seen a remarkable improvement according to those customers of mine that host there.

OVH doesn't even want to take my money to keep my server running. Their auto-billing process is busted and when it goes wrong they just delete your server.

That's not what I've seen. I misconfigured my auto-billing and got paged in the middle of the night by nodes mysteriously disappearing, but they released those machines minutes after my CC went through. Not that I'm a big fan of OVH but if you design your system to allow for failure you can't match their value for money.

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